Wednesday, March 19, 2008
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NPR has aired a report about the results of 3,000 floating, temperature and salinity profiling robots deployed by the Argo collaboration in 2003. After five years, they finally sent us comprehensive data about the heat content of the oceans.

The heat content of the oceans is important because 80-90 percent of the newly created heat goes into the oceans and their warming should be more uniformly aligned with any hypothetical trends. Despite the oceans' dominant role in the heat budget, there are people who find them inconvenient: for example, oceans do not suffer from the urban heat island effects for obvious reasons. ;-)

At any rate, the robots have falsified the prediction of a significant warming. There has been no significant change of the temperature since 2003. In other words, there has never been any global warming observed by these sinking robots. In fact, the oceans have cooled down a little bit. But there are only 4 oceans which is too small a number to undermine the consensus of 2,500 "top experts". On the other hand, 3,000 is more than 2,500 so if you trust robots, the consensus about global warming could be overthrown. ;-)

The NPR program is very entertaining because, for example, Kevin Trenberth, a hardcore IPCC alarmist, is proposing that cooling effects induced by the clouds might be responsible for the observational discrepancy. ;-) If Trenberth re-discovers the iris effect, after many years, I wonder whether he will remember that Richard Lindzen has done it a long time before him.

They say that global warming may have taken a "breather" or it may be on a "brief hiatus". I wonder how they figured out the "brief" word. If a model gives completely wrong numerical predictions for five-year periods, what is the exact reason that it won't give wrong predictions for ten-year or thirty-year periods? Five years is not a negligible time scale for oceans: it is pretty much equal to the effective time constant.